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We are SYSTRAN and we love languages…

We are SYSTRAN. We love languages, lots of languages. We are a human-sized company but we have linguists for almost all of the 140 language pairs we support. That’s a big number, but don’t be misled- some of us are fluent in many languages. Nevertheless, we love languages and we don’t believe in the one-fits-all technology regarding language processing.

We are SYSTRAN, and we have been around for 48 years… that’s right, since the beginning of machine translation! That may not make us seem young and crazy but with age comes wisdom, and we have contributed to the biggest machine translation technology breakthrough. Perhaps at heart we are and have always been young and crazy after all.

We are SYSTRAN, and we also love technology and programming languages and a lot of us are fluent in many of them.

We are SYSTRAN and we have witnessed the different hypes surrounding machine translation that have emerged over the years. We have already adapted and transformed our technology over the years to be at the forefront of the market, but this time we truly believe something entirely new is coming. This new thing isn’t an interminable encyclopedia of language descriptions. Nor is it about gathering huge quantities of data and processing it in big data centers. This time it is different. This time it actually looks smart, and it looks like us!

We are SYSTRAN and we are committed to facilitating communication between people by providing them with the best-of-breed translation technology for their specific use-cases.

We are SYSTRAN and we know there are a lot of smart people who don’t work at SYSTRAN but who share our same passion and goals. Therefore, we have decided to reach out to them and collaborate.

Because we are SYSTRAN, because we love languages and technology, because we want to provide our customers with the best technologies, and because we believe in sharing, we have been closely following neural machine translation since its inception, and we have decided to give it a go and share our experience.

A few weeks ago we announced that we were about to launch our new technology: Pure Neural™ Machine Translation, adding to our already wide panel of available technologies. Our researchers, linguists and engineers have spent days and nights on experiments, developments, trainings, they have worked on GPU trainings for over 50,000 cumulated hours and we are proud to announce the first release of our Pure Neural™ Machine Translation available for testing here: http://demo-pnmt.systran.net.
The technical description of our recipes and findings in detail are available here.

This is just a first release, but every day we have more and more reason to be excited about the improvements observed. We have also noticed new behaviors that won’t work for our customers and are working on fixing them. Even though this is only our first version, we have already enrolled ten major customers in a beta-testing program to make sure that the technology truly fits their needs. After this real-life validation phase of a couple of months, our customers will be able to use this technology in their production flows.

Let’s be clear, this innovative technology will not replace human translators. Nor does it produce translation which is almost indistinguishable from human translation – but we are convinced that the results we have seen so far mark the start of a new era in translation technologies, and that it will definitely contribute to facilitating communication between people. As is the case with any technology, it is just one piece of the puzzle. We are SYSTRAN, we work to build the best piece.